Here’s something to smile about.
The enigma wrapped in a riddle known as Mona Lisa has long been the subject of speculation: Is her ambiguous expression a smile?
A recent study by the University of Freiburg in Germany found that nearly 100 percent of people described her as unequivocally “happy.”
“We really were astonished,” neuroscientist Juergen Kornmeier, who co-authored the study, told Agence France-Presse.
Kornmeier and other experts used Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece — arguably the most famous artwork in the world — in a study of factors that influence how people judge visual cues such as facial expressions.
Known as La Gioconda in Italian, Mona Lisa appears to many to be smiling coyly at first, but then appears to actually be sneering mockingly or sadly the longer one looks.
Using a black-and-white copy of the early-16th-century painting from the Louvre museum in Paris, a team manipulated her mouth corners slightly up and down to create eight images — four slightly “happier” and four “sadder.”
Nine images were shown to 12 trial participants 30 times. In every showing, for which the pictures were randomly reshuffled, the people had to describe each of the images as happy or sad.
“Given the descriptions from art and art history, we thought that the original would be the most ambiguous,” Kornmeier said.
Instead, “to our great astonishment, we found that da Vinci’s original was … perceived as happy” in 97 percent of cases.
A second phase of the experiment involved the original Mona Lisa with eight “sadder” versions, with even more subtle differences in the lip tilt.
In this test, the original was still described as happy, but participants’ reading of the other images changed.
“They were perceived a little sadder” than in the first experiment, Kornmeier said.
The findings show that “we don’t have an absolute fixed scale of happiness and sadness in our brain” — and that a lot depends on context, the researcher said.
“Our brain manages to very, very quickly scan the field. We notice the total range, and then we adapt our estimates” using our memory of previous sensory experiences, he said.
This isn’t the first time scientists have claimed to have solved the Mona Lisa conundrum.
In 2015, scientists from the UK’s Sheffield Hallam University claimed that da Vinci had developed a technique for an “uncatchable smile” that is visible only from certain angles, artnet.com reported.
Questions have also long swirled about her true identity. The general consensus is that the painting depicts Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant.
An Italian art detective last year claimed she also was based on da Vinci’s apprentice — and probably gay lover, The Telegraph of the UK reported.
Silvano Vinceti said the portrait is an “androgynous” amalgam of Gherardini and Gian Giacomo Caprotti, better known by his nickname, Salai.
But his claims were met with skepticism by one of the world’s leading authorities on da Vinci.
“This is a mish-mash of known things, semi-known things and complete fantasy,” Martin Kemp, professor emeritus of the history of art at Trinity College, Oxford, told The Telegraph.